The making of Dante. Modelling tips.

final model of the head.

Hello HypefroActive fans and welcome to another wonderful edition of Animations on HypefroActive. So i kick off the day with my newest animation job and i'm in the modelling stage. I didnt  find this funny at all, owing to the fact that i've not touched 3dsmax for close to a year now and jumping right back in, i hear the tools in the program say "oh no you dont". Well, i'm here and i've got to do what i"ve got to do. So let's go.

Ordinarily, i find it difficult to use references to model and even when i find one, i still dont keep to it. And even when i went back for some drawing lessons and thinking "ok this time i will constrain myself to this drawn out reference", well no i still didnt respect that. Somehow anyways and after a lot of hours of modelling, i came up with these. It really is an improvement of a lot of the things i've modeled so yaaaaaay, i'm happy with it, thank you very much.

refining the head

However while modelling, i found out that if i'd stayed with the model i would have been faster and it would probably have turned out a lot easier for me especially with the reference looking at you in the face and you dont have to make speculations on where what should stay. The con however is that you are confined to a particular model and you are too serious doing what it is you are doing because it looks like a job instead of something you should be enjoying.

head almost done

The biggest lesson here is that, after modelling the head and because i used the symmetry modifier to achieve this, i should have collapsed the symmetry modifier into the edit poly modifier making the head model one whole object. If you are on this path modelling for animations and you do not collapse all you have in that stack into its basic modelling modifier, in this case the 'edit poly", then you would have problems when the time comes to add the morpher. The morph would work properly as expected but will seem to malfunction when you move vertices that are existing on the axis of symmetry to either side of the horizontal or x-plane and i'm sure that's not what you want unless ofcourse it's planned that way. So this little advice goes out to the newbies because i know that the pros know about this evil trick.

Alright, that's all i have for now and remember there is no gain if there is no pain. Animation requires sacrifice and it wont come cheap but that dont mean you should give up. So until i see you again, keep animating.